Spent Christmas vacation relaxing and doing very little and now I'm back at school again. Four months to go!

I haven't been very involved with free software since September. Hopefully that will change come May. There is a group of us kicking around some ideas for the summer but I'll talk about that once it gets underway.

I love school - we're finally doing some real UNIX programming (specifically, SMP programming on a 4 processor Sparc). After 3 years of Java bullshit (including the use of Java to teach an OS class...sheesh), it's nice to be doing real work.[1]

I also accepted a coaching job over the Christmas holidays. I will be an assistant coach for the freestyle skiing development league. Since I started university of few years ago, I have really missed being involved with the sport. I'm very happy to be returning, albeit with a different role.

[1] In other applications, such as JSP, I actually don't mind Java very much. I just hate having to use it constantly in school when C is more appropriate for the subject being covered.

School started and I began ignoring advogato (and I will do so for long periods of time until next April). I must say that, so far, this last year looks like it will be my favourite. I like all of my profs, the projects that will be assigned are finally interesting and I seem to be a little more social this year. This semester is almost equally divided between AI robotics and computer security, so I'm quite content.

My power supply bit it this past week while I was away in Cornwall. It's fun coming home to a crashed Linux machine and saying: "Gee, must be a hardware problem" (and being correct). This also reminded me that it's about fsck'ing time to start using ext3.

The past month has been relaxing. I spent two weekends at my dad's cottage and, without work, I haven't spent all that much time online. I did manage to send my follow-up questions to Biella, but it took me nearly a month. I have also spent a lot of time with Karine, which is always nice. Hopefully it won't be too much of a shock when school starts up again in two weeks.

I sent out the proposal for the Security SIG to the oclug-board mailing list, so now it's time to actually get things done. It was suggested that OCLUG have a security-themed month (most likely November, as all the meetings until then already have speakers). This would most likely include a talk at the regular meeting, in addition to a tutorial near the end of the month (most likely a FreeS/WAN tutorial, courtesy of rgb).

Anthropology

I finally got my survey questions off to Biella on July 19th, and she has since sent me some follow-up questions that I have yet to answer. Fortunately these new questions aren't as long as the ones in the original questionnaire (questions and answers combined totalled over 700 lines).

I was thinking today that it would be terribly funny if Microsoft got caught for some sort of accounting fraud, which seems to be all the rage in the US media (even here in Canada, Nortel is getting hit with a class action suit). After a year of hearing how Linux is bad for the economy, how Linux is a "cancer", and how Linux is "un-American", I think I would get a quick laugh out of it.

Still haven't finished the questionnaire for Biella, the anthropologist that I met at DebConf. I wanted to have it finished by Sunday, but it has just been one of those weeks. Hopefully I'll have some time tonight to answer the two remaining questions (which are pretty long and open-ended) and send it off to her.

Since talking with kmcmartin at OLS about starting a Security SIG within OCLUG, I have been seriously considering it. This was proposed more than a year ago and everyone seemed to like the idea, but it was never carried forward for some odd reason (which I don't want to get into). There still seems to be some interest, so it could very well be proposed again. Some ideas are floating around now, and hopefully they can be properly organized this time.

I am back from Debconf 2 and Toronto. James, a friend of mine from OCLUG also attended, but it looks like he'll be staying down there now (he landed a job in the Toronto area). I enjoyed myself but I think the talks would have been slightly better if questions were held until the very end. I also got a small "Powered by Debian" sticker for my iBook, which is slightly more subtle than the big, black "LINUX IS THE SHIT" sticker that is pasted on Branden Robinson's iBook.

All of my patches for the Kernel Janitors project turned out to be useless. According to Rusty Russell, SET_MODULE_OWNER in net drivers is going away in the near future. No big deal - they were only two- or three-line patches anyways. Time to have the janitor's TODO file updated, I guess.

I am currently in Toronto for Debconf 2.I am staying with some e-mail friends and I was worried that the conference would prevent us from spending time together. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised when they both showed up after work today - it turns out that they signed up for it! That was very thoughtful of them (I just hope that they enjoy it).

Before the conference got underway, I was fortunate to be sitting beside Gabriela (last name eludes me at the moment). She's an anthropologist studying Debian for her dissertation and she is wonderfully clueful. She is attending the conference in order to interview developers for her work and she types away on her tiny portable (running Linux, of course). She was telling a group of us how The Ruckus Society (and many other politically active groups) was learning to use Free software because it fit with their ideology. Cool.

I left my laptop behind today, but I'll bring it tommorow. Hopefully I will be productive in some way.

I finally caught up on the sleep that I lost during OLS only to find myself submitting corrected patches to kernel-janitor-discuss and the trivial patch monkey. Perhaps my wannabe-ness is pretty evident (most likely, with a few one-liners), but the feedback from the authors seems pretty positive, or at least non-threatening (even when one of them pointed out that the patches I sent were all wrong). So now, after sending out corrections, it's 1am and I have to wake up in 5 hours or so in order to catch a bus to Toronto, where I'll visit friends that I have never met and afterwards attend Debconf 2.

My iBook made some weird screeching noise when I woke it up from sleep at OLS today. Fortunately it happened between talks, so I didn't annoy a speaker or make myself look like too much of an ass. It also looks like
I'm not the only one.

Discovered driftnet while at the conference. With this being my first time on a wireless network, this is pretty scary. Mental note: try to apply the FreeS/WAN patch to my benh (PowerPC) kernel, so that I can start using wavesec tommorow.